Elizabeth, thanks for the brick-o’-notebooks link. Awesome resource!!

I know what you mean about switching positions to write. I have a lap desk, too, and use it on the couch. The reclined position is definitely different energy. Otherwise, I sit up on the couch in the corner. The desktop I use only for my writing business writing. I’m looking forward to seeing where I sit in the studio when I write. Deck, art table, comfortable chair?

ybonesy, where do you like to write?

http://search.office1000.com/77517

Be sure to buy the 8.5″ x 11″ booklets.

Yes, I am back to using my little writing porch, as well as the couch (with my little lap desk). I get different energy writing in a reclined position versus sitting up straight in a chair at my desk. I seem to go back and forth between these two spots.

I wish I had a Yoda notebook! I have a number of Mickey and Minnie Mouse notebooks, as well as two Spiderman notebooks I just found at the 99¢ store last week!

yb,

Avoid thick notebooks at all costs! The point is to use something it’s possible to fill up. Nowadays I mostly favor Mead single-subject 70-page WIDE ruled spiral notebooks. You can find them anywhere (OfficeMax and Office Depot always have them) and they’re fill-up-able.

Lately when I’m working on a specific chapter, I like to use Roaring Spring Blue Book Examination Books. I buy them by the large shrink-wrapped brick. They have 8 saddle-stitched leaves, yielding 16 pages total, making it possible to fill each one up in a couple of days.

Very satisfying.

I’m kind of intrigued by this whole question of why some people persist with their creative goals (or any type of goal, for that matter), and why others struggle. What is it that differentiates us all?

I don’t feel like I’m disciplined enough — that there’s always more than I can do. BTW, I thought it was interesting to read in our latest guest post, An Evening With Elizabeth Gilbert & Anne Lamott (LINK), that neither author claims to have any discipline whatsoever. Yet, just take Lamott — she’s completed many books, and good ones.

So how much does discipline factor in to the completion of creative endeavors? Maybe not as much as this question of how much you really want it. That’s more about need, want, desire than it is about discipline, isn’t it? Lots to think about.

ybonesy, yes, I was there to bear witness - 100 spiral notebooks, lined up on a bedroom bookcase shelf (do I remember a Yoda notebook?). Impressive. And a testament to her practice!

Elizabeth, where do you do your writing now? Do you still use the little nook space near the kitchen? Just curious if that has shifted for you over the years.

Some of my discipline is innate, but some of it is a learned behavior, developed when I was in college.

The innate part comes from my experience in music with the structure of practicing. I think in some ways the innate part is the question itself of, Do I want X more than I want Y? When I was very little, I wanted to learn how to play the piano. It was the one thing I wanted more than I wanted to please my parents. I kept asking and asking and asking for piano lessons until they finally relented (I was only five, so I think they saw many more years of potential nagging ahead of them).

In college, when I had to learn some new disciplines if I was going to stay afloat, I had to keep asking myself, Do I want to master this process (fill in whatever process it was — learning a language, writing a successful essay, pass a certain kind of test) more than I want to have fun tonight? Whatever I was, I noticed that the more I did it and committed to it, the better I got at it. It developed basic trust in the process.

With writing practice, what Natalie laid out just made sense to me. I am a very obedient inner child when it comes to reading and following instructions.

In Bones, when Natalie explained the rules of writing practice, I just said, Okay, and followed them.

When she said, Fill one spiral notebook a month, I just said, Okay, and tried always to do that (ask QM some time about lining up and counting the first 100 or so of my spiral notebooks at my house one Thanksgiving).

When I did the intensive, I committed to it even though I had to do some paid work every time on the side.

But my core question has to remain in front of my face all the time. Sometimes I just have to hang an index card up on my desk (or carry it around with me) that says:

This is the Universe asking, How much do you want this?

I think I learned this kind of thinking from Natalie’s books too, especially when I read about her having a cold and dragging her sorry ass down the street to the Galisteo newsstand to write anyway.

Eventually the question becomes innate but I find that I never get to stop asking it.

And now, back to figuring out what the hell needs to happen in chapter 13.

You are a disciplined person, though, I can tell from writing with you. Is that a learned trait from your previous working life? QM is disciplined, too. I am, too, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. In reality, I would love to lie around all day, reading, eating vinegar and salt potato chips (or sunflower seeds), and napping.

I notice that I have been thinking in memoir form about this process of rewriting. You are 100% right — this processhas definitely rekindled my enthusiasm for writing fresh from scratch!

But I notice too that I am learning something powerful from the process of being forced to rethink what I’ve got — and from the discipline of having a deadline.

I feel clinically nuts a lot of days in this process, shuffling around in my robe and slippers like a mental patient. But I don’t care that much. Not any more.

It’s as if the Universe keeps asking me, How much do you want this?

And I have to keep reaching deeper and deeper into my soul to find the answer. I keep discovering that I have to want to learn how to do this even more than I want the end result to succeed.

So please, if you see me shuffling by in my socks and bathrobe and crazy hair and muttering to myself, send kind thoughts and vibes in my direction.

When I first started the memoir I am working on now, it encompassed a huge scope of my life, the different places I had lived informing the whole. Once I started doing the research and writing, I realized that was way too big. I had to pare it down. And now I’m focused on one particular section,one place, one moment in my life, looking for the angle to reveal itself to me. Natalie was right — the most important part of writing is listening.

I was drawn to what you said about structure — how she wants the book to be read as a whole, not sectioned off. It seemed like Writing Down the Bones was a book where you could go in and pull out any chapter. I wondered if you had any thoughts on the different structure of Old Friend From Far Away.

These lines spoke to me at the place I was feeling last weekend:

Don’t let the light go out. Get to work, even if the going is slow and you have six mouths to feed and two jobs.

No protest, no whining. Right now take a nibble of bread. Make a bit of effort. It does not have to be enormous. Just go in the right direction and the trees, insects, clouds, bricks of buildings will make a minute turning with you and salute you.

When I start to feel low energy, I have to remember to simply take the next right step. To make even a small effort. Eventually, the tide will turn and I’ll feel full again. This seems like a post I can come back to again. Thanks for writing it.

Franny, four days in a tiny town on the Northern California coast–no telephone, no television, no cell phone service, a little cabin and a woodstove sounds like heaven. A bit intimidating at first. It might take me a day to sink into it. But all that writing space, just for you. What a gift.

Like ybonesy, I remember your jail stories, down to the details. I was really listening. And they are so far from anything I have ever experienced. I am drawn to hear about them. I’m glad you are giving yourself the time to write.

Yes, about Taos — we can’t go back. I’m more and more inspired every day with the ways all of our projects are manifesting in the world after the Intensive. I wouldn’t want to go back and and try to recreate anything. Simply carry what I’ve learned about my practice forward the best I can.

Still, Taos will always have a place in my heart. It’s where I learned to believe I was a writer worth listening to, and that the practice was deeper than just writing. It was the place I strengthened my writing muscles and learned the value of having a writing community around me.

Franny, whenever you wrote and read jail stories, I was riveted. Those stories are knocking to get out — I could tell by the intensity with which they came out. The notion of spending four days hunkered down in a cabin writing sounds so perfect. And yes, you’re so right about not stepping into the river twice. (Although I wouldn’t mind floating down the Rio Grande again .) I’d love to hear more about the new experiences you discover and how they work for you.

Elizabeth, this next part of your journey with your book — taking it apart and putting it back together again — is probably the least understood, the least teachable aspect of writing a book. Yet, I hope when you’re done you can somehow encapsulate it and share with us how it worked. The idea of getting up writing something totally fresh seems so much more appealing than rewriting. So I can only guess at how much resistance you face every day while you’re doing this. And I admire your persistence!!

I especially loved this beautiful and inspiring excerpt:

“No institution can give you this authority; though you may learn many wonderful things there. Like a little bird, you must open your small beak and feed yourself one drop of rosewater at a time, then a kernel of corn, a single sesame seed, even a tiny pebble. Keep nourishing yourself on great writers. You will grow from the inside out and stand up on the page.
No protest, no whining. Right now take a nibble of bread. Make a bit of effort. It does not have to be enormous. Just go in the right direction and the trees, insects, clouds, bricks of buildings will make a minute turning with you and salute you”

I hope she doesn’t mind if I apply it to artists too?

This is the kind of gift Natalie gives me in every book she writes — that connection to the importance of the doing, without regard for any gaining idea, as Suzuki Roshi says.

Just to do the writing work is enough.

Does memoir ever become “finished”? I don’t think so. I mean, you can write about so many experiences and aspects of your life, and in that way memoir is, in my visual way of looking at things, like a faceted diamond. So many angles to take. But I do think you can take one of those angles and complete it. Whether it’s published only for family or for the whole world is a different matter.

In the excerpt Natalie read that I highlighted in this post, she is, of course, urging her students to aim for the stars. Those urgings inspire me. But my father wrote his memoirs for our family, and that “book” is as cherished as — and in reality, more than — my favorite memoirs by known authors.

Something about NM though draws me…I would like to know more about the intensive being mentioned.

Natalie’s newest book was published at such a wonderful time for me, and it caught me back into the process of writing practice right at a point when I need it most in my life. (In my younger years, I found Bones to be THE most important spiritual practice I learned) I grew up in the south, living now in Baltimore, MD. Something QM said in one of her comments about NM being her sacred home, and yet not wanting to move there…I can identify with that. I have that type of relationship with Asheville, NC. I am now working on a memoir about my Southern grandmother; it is mostly in the journal format right now, so I am trying to figure out how to put all of this into a finished work. I also wonder does memoir ever become “finished”?

I love that I found red Ravine.

Hands are powerful. I see my aging parents’ hands in my own.

I do have a local writing practice group, but unfortunately, no, we’re a small group of friends who first socialize then sit then write.

I used to co-host a writing group that for five years kept an ad in the Weekly Alibi. That worked out fairly well, mainly because there was a core group of about 4 people who showed up every week.

Finding a Bones-style writing practice group is a special thing, and I would say it’s worth founding one if you can’t find one.